The result of a year of outreach to San Diego

A year ago, when I was still new to this job, a group of community activists came to my office looking for answers.

What role do race and ethnicity play in your personnel decisions, they wanted to know.

That was easy: No role at all, I told them. Our criteria at the U-T are all about job skills, performance and business needs.

Their next question was harder: How are you going to build a newsroom that reflects this community?

I found that a difficult question on many levels. So I was very glad when my visitors told me: We would like to help you.

From that first meeting with Enrique Morones, Alex Nogales, Olivia Puentes-Reynolds and Gus Chavez emerged an experiment in communication and community outreach. Together, we built an advisory council that meets monthly at the U-T to wrestle with the issues that accompany the responsibility to the community that is part of our company’s mission.

Here is some of the work the Latino Advisory Council has helped to accomplish in its first year:

Inclusion: We remade our editorial board into a community panel that includes people from many backgrounds, political philosophies and ethnicities to better reflect our community.

Clarity of purpose: We articulated the fundamental importance of our community in the values of the company and of the newsroom. Our company statement reads, in part, “The San Diego Union-Tribune values diversity at all levels and strives toward an inclusive, culturally sensitive and respectful environment.” Our journalistic guidelines now note, “One of our fundamental values is to seek out a diversity of opinions and ideas.”

Training: We began work with San Diego State University on a training program to help our reporters develop their skills in accessing different communities and reporting without cultural, political or gender bias.

Quality: We changed SignOnSanDiego’s commenting system to eliminate anonymity in an effort to raise the level of conversation, introduce accountability and eliminate hate speech and racism from our site.

Education: We are beginning a monthly speakers series for our staff on the communities of San Diego to better understand, and cover, the many people and places of our region. (It launches in October.)

Community recognition: We began work on a Latino Champions banquet scheduled for this spring, in which local community leaders will be recognized for their contributions to San Diego.

We also did the basic business you would expect of a group like this. We audited the diversity of the staff and of our new hires. We examined the content of our pages to develop a clear picture of our sources. We debated stories that were written, and others that we missed.

The group has accomplished far more than I could have imagined last year, and has done so in a spirit of frankness and friendship that I have rarely encountered.

Let’s revisit that first meeting for a moment. On my desk sat a report that showed the ethnicity of our staff: 80 percent non-Hispanic white in a community that is 50 percent non-Hispanic white. Across the table sat four Latinos requesting equity.

I did not have easy answers for them.

Given likely rates of turnover and hiring, it could take many years to bring the ethnic profile of the staff into numerical conformity with the community. Even then, we would be addressing only ethnicity. What about age, gender or other demographics? Not to mention the obvious problems of a philosophy that equates the quality of the journalism with the race of the journalist. How far do we want to go down that road?

Their message to me was: We are people who care about San Diego. We think the paper can help to build a better community. We want to help.

That spirit has made our project possible. We all believe that by working together in good faith and embracing diversity as a value we can build understanding in our community and integrity in our journalism.

Our company handbook now says:

“We commit ourselves to continuously promote a better understanding and appreciation of each other, and of the community we serve. Our commitment toward inclusion not only makes our company stronger, but enables us to support and achieve our mission as a media company – to improve the lives and build a stronger community through information, insight and ideas.”

Last year, many readers asked me, why a Latino advisory council? What about everyone else?

My answer was simply: This seems like a good place to start.

When you look at the work of the first year, I see less about Latino outreach than about community outreach in general. As journalists, that is the wellspring for everything we do. Next up: expanding this effort to reach more and more of San Diego.

Light is the editor of The San Diego Union-Tribune. He wrote this commentary in conjunction with Olivia Puentes-Reynolds, co-chair of the Latino Advisory Council and a member of the U-T’s Community Editorial Board.